Abstract
Despite its legal proscription in most countries and the global attention garnered by the #MeToo movement, workplace sexual harassment remains a ubiquitous part of millions of women’s daily lives. The aims of this chapter are threefold: first, to briefly examine the legal foundation as it pertains to gendered abuse in the workplace; second, to review reports, statistics and scholarly debate on occupational sexual harassment in the wake of the #MeToo social media campaign; third, to analyse the literary representation of workplace inequality and female maltreatment in three works of dystopian fiction by Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Heart Goes Last (2015) and The Testaments (2019). Further reform is urgently needed to redress gendered power disparities; Atwood and #MeToo incite a call to action.
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Notes
- 1.
Needless to say the term ‘woman’ includes all persons who identify as woman/girl/female/she/her, but in the literary discussion of Atwood’s works and for the purposes of this chapter, the two terms ‘woman’ and ‘man’ refer to a binary dichotomy of genders where cisgendered heterosexual persons are the societal norm. In taking this perspective, this chapter strives towards highlighting the harmful effects of a non-inclusive gender system as well as problematizing the wider implications of the power disparity inherent therein.
- 2.
On October 15, 2017, actor Alyssa Milano wrote in her Twitter feed: ‘Me Too. Suggested by a friend: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me Too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem…. If you have been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet”’.
- 3.
Perhaps the most high-profile case was the film producer Harry Weinstein. However, other prominent personalities in areas such as sports, culture and popular culture were accused of sexual harassment, such as USA Gymnastics Physician Dr Larry Nassar; comedian Louis CK; culture profile Jean-Claude Arnault, married to a member of the Swedish Academy; TV host Matt Lauer; actor Kevin Spacey; and former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
- 4.
The senate hearings held before confirming the appointment of Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991, in which Anita F. Hill detailed allegations of workplace sexual harassment against Judge Thomas, her former supervisor at the EEOC, were a highly mediated first of sexual harassment cases to garner global attention (Jacobs, 2018).
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Rokka, S. (2021). From ‘Mayday’ to #MeToo: Sexual Harassment in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Workplaces in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments and The Heart Goes Last. In: Henry, A., Persson, Å. (eds) Engaging with Work in English Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69720-4_10
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